Better Late Than Early: How AI Integration Timing Shapes Creativity Judgments

Does the timing of artificial intelligence (AI) integration into creative work affect how creators are judged? While integrating AI at the beginning or at the end of the creative process may reflect strategic reasoning rather than a creative deficiency, eight main and four supplemental experiments (N = 5,272) reveal that creators are perceived as less creative when they integrate AI recommendations at the beginning rather than at the end of their creative work (meta-analytic effect: g = −0.61, 95% CI [−0.73, −0.49]; k = 19). This occurs partly because creators are perceived as less effortful and less authentic when they integrate AI recommendations at the beginning of the creative process. This early-integration penalty generalizes across creative domains, persists even when the total contribution of AI is held constant, and holds regardless of the creator’s expertise. Consequently, consumers value products less when they are created with early AI integration, and managers reward early AI integrators less. Communicating that the creator modified rather than directly implemented AI recommendations attenuates the penalty. Together, these findings indicate that evaluators consider not only whether creators use AI, but also when and how creators integrate it into the creative process, advancing the psychology of human-AI collaboration.